(Photo: Courtesy of LMDC)

Freedom’s Not Free
Says an Architect Who Claims David Childs Stole His Design
"No one wants to sue a multinational corporation,” says architect Thomas Shine. But last week, he filed a copyright suit against David Childs and his multinational architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The suit contends that Childs saw a design Shine made at Yale in 1999 (right), praised it, and then copied it for the Freedom Tower (left). Childs’s firm concedes the two designs “share common elements,” including the “diagrid” structure, but those things “have been industry standards for years.” So does Shine have a case? Buildings weren’t copyrightable in the U.S. until 1990, so “the law is underdeveloped,” notes an intellectual-property lawyer. (A student sued Rem Koolhaas in Britain and lost.) And while some architects in the city are enjoying Childs’s latest problems with the Freedom Tower, others wondered why he was even named as a defendant. As one woman at a high-profile firm asked, “Didn’t Libeskind design the tower?”
—Kate Pickert